Writers’ Lives Reimagined

The third book in Lock’s American Novels series takes a scalpel to Edgar Allan Poe and his fetish for the grotesque underworld of occult phenomena. (The first, “The Boy in His Winter,” reconstructed Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” and “American Meteor” fictionalized Walt Whitman’s Civil War America.) Poe is credited with inaugurating the genre of modern detective fiction with stories like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” written as dialogues between an unnamed narrator and the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. In a nod to Poe’s paradigm, Lock’s Edward Fenzil recounts to an interlocutor his tormented associations with both Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter, the 19th-century surgeon and connoisseur of gruesome medical specimens.

Despite the series heading, Lock’s novel engages not merely with his American antecedents but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as Edward is by Poe’s, the narrator initially wary but eventually surrendering to Poe’s infectiously morbid fiction. Echoes of Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.

The lives of three women living centuries apart converge in their singular relationship with a single manuscript: the late-19th-century diary of Zinaida Lintvaryova, a physician and daughter of a landowning Ukrainian family who has lost her sight. Zinaida recounts the summers when the Chekhov family — including their son, Anton Pavlovich — rented the guesthouse of her family’s property in the country. In the present day, a beleaguered London publisher, Katya Kendall, enlists Ana Harding, an American living in a village in France, to translate Zinaida’s journal into English, hoping its publication will rescue her press from bankruptcy.

The novel progresses in alternating chapters, moving from Zinaida’s recollections of her intimacy with Chekhov to Katya’s anxieties over the fates of her business and her marriage and Ana’s professional insecurities as an “invisible” translator rather than “the more glamorous author.” (It is worth noting that Anderson is herself a translator as well as a novelist.)

The book blurs the line between firsthand experience and imagining worlds one cannot know, either because of blindness or the removals of time and geography, and renders authentic and memorable portraits of its three heroines.

Narrated by Aemilia Bassano Lanier, a cross-dressing poetess of Jewish descent living on the periphery of the court of Queen Elizabeth at the turn of the 17th century, Sharratt’s historical novel is not just a response to the enigmas surrounding Shakespeare’s sonnets but also an absorbing bildungsroman that grapples with strikingly contemporary issues of gender and religious identification, definitions and discrimination. Over the course of the novel, Aemilia — at times dressing as a man — crosses boundaries of geography, sex and faith on a path that leads her from her father’s household at the age of 7 to a refined education among Christian nobility to an ethically compromised stint as a courtesan, followed by an unwilling marriage. Later, she collaborates on some of Shakespeare’s most famous works as his lover, only to suffer a betrayal she cannot forgive. At every turn the reader grows increasingly attached to this sympathetic and admirable heroine, whose weaknesses make her all the more convincingly human.

Sharratt nimbly traces the inspiration for such masterpieces as “Twelfth Night” and “Romeo and Juliet” alongside the timeline of Shakespeare’s journey with Aemilia, her influence carrying him from poverty to extramarital and literary bliss. Against all odds — despite Will’s disloyalty and the overwhelming oppression facing women in general — Aemilia’s strength of character and resolve to earn her status prevail as she becomes the first Englishwoman to attempt, let alone achieve, even modest success as a published writer.

THE HONEYMOONBy Dinitia Smith415 pp. Other Press, $26.95.

Smith’s fourth novel sketches the life of Marian Evans, who achieved celebrity during her lifetime publishing novels under the male pseudonym George Eliot, and was widely esteemed for her peerless breadth and depth of learning in subjects as diverse as philosophy, politics, literature and history. Smith imagines her biography as a series of formative relationships with men — from her once idolized father and older brother to her complicated romantic entanglements with such literary lights as Charles Bray and George Henry Lewes.

Smith’s narrative follows the 60-year-old Eliot’s troubled honeymoon in Venice with her 40-year-old husband, John Walter Cross, but the true thrust of the novel lies in the protagonist’s reflections on the culminating romance of her life: her impassioned partnership with Lewes, from whose death she never recovers. Smith’s enchanting account humanizes a figure renowned as much for her refutation of conventional female stereotypes and social limitations as for her genius for story and language. Eliot’s personal life is reflected here as a series of deep insecurities regarding her appeal to men and the contributions her partners made to her work — “Felix Holt,” “Middlemarch,” “Daniel Deronda” — novels that endure as some of the most formative texts in English literature.

Lauren Christensen, formerly on the ­editorial staff of Vanity Fair, is pursuing a graduate degree at Oxford.